Transmission 03 | 07.12.24
First of all, a huge thanks to everyone who made it to the opening of my current show as guest artist at Propeller Studio and Gallery on Granville Island, and to those who have visited since. I really appreciate the interest and support. I’m thrilled with how everything has come together and love how my work is interweaving with the beautiful work Propeller creates and curates in that space. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, the show will be up until early October.
Greetings From Another Planet1
After the opening, we tidied things up, Tristesse finished the teaching year, and we packed up for a joint art residency at Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West in Joshua Tree, where I’m writing from now.
We’ve followed Zittel’s work for a couple of decades, so when we were in Joshua Tree last spring, we made sure to check out her compound and artwork, which she has been evolving since 2000. This visit planted the seed for a possible future residency. If you’re unfamiliar with Zittel, this video provides a small introduction to her work, thinking, and A-Z West, in general.2
“What makes us feel liberated is not total freedom, but rather living in a set of limitations, which we have created and prescribed for ourselves.”
– Andrea Zittel | These things I know for sure #10)
While here, Tristesse is taking advantage of the beautiful weaving studio to further develop that emerging aspect of her practice, while I’ve been working from the renovated jackrabbit homestead cabin3 we’re calling home for the week. I’ve been focused on the more portable aspects of my practice — sketches for new collages; zine layouts; research; making and editing photographs. Most importantly, I’m utilizing the space and time to think about new ideas and fine-tune my focus in a new environment, with plenty of desert walking — miles and miles of it.
The Work of Art
I just finished reading Adam Moss’s new book, "The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing," which investigates the creative process through conversations with people engaged in a wide variety of creative disciplines. Moss engages with many figures familiar to me, including Kara Walker, Liz Diller4, David Simon, Amy Sillman, and George Saunders, as well as several new to me. As an enthusiast of all things creative process, this book is deep in my wheelhouse. If you share my interest in the wide array of ways creative things come to life, I recommend it. The text is great, but the book also integrates visual artefacts of the creative process (attention notebook, sketchbook, and napkin drawing nerds). On top of it all, it’s just a lovely thing to hold.
In adjacent territory, I’m finally returning to "The Beatles: Get Back."5 I started it when it came out but, for some reason, it didn’t grip me then — it’s gripping me now. Naturally, there is a significant layer of basic human relationships and interpersonal drama in these hours of film. What’s most interesting to me, though, is watching the collaborative creative dynamics in action and the level of openness present as they communicate and evolve ideas in real time.
While there is creative brilliance at play, it’s crucial to note the amount of actual play at play here. Fooling around pays off, and these four were masters at it. When they aren’t banging out other people’s songs, mining their own song archive for kicks, swapping instruments, sitting around smoking6 and chatting, they manage to squeeze in all the lyrical and musical tinkering necessary to form the songs that would become their final release (along with a number songs that dotted Abbey Road and the first solo records.)
Because many of these songs are just loose outlines when the documentation begins, we hear the initial clicks and grunts of what will become some of the most well-known songs of late 20th-century western music. It’s a strange feeling watching them fumble for the final word or riff when we, as viewers, know how it turns out. From here in the future, I feel oddly compelled to somehow push them in the “right” direction. We see how all the twists and turns forge the final work, reminding us that a completed work is simply the version where the labour stopped and it was pronounced done.
That’s it for now; until next time!
✌️D
“I always thought it was so interesting that this was the landscape that was chosen to be most representative of another planet” (Zittel referring to NASA using the Mojave Desert to test habitation on Mars.)
Art21 has a number of videos with her. I think they are all on YouTube.
Oh, the Jackrabbit Homestead is an interesting rabbit hole. If you’re interested, artist and writer Kim Stringfellow has done an extensive project on this. Check out her dedicated site for a primer.
I recall being a bit obsessed with the project she discusses. I first read about it in the late nineties when it was being proposed but hadn’t yet been built. I was like, “wait, that can be architecture?” This also ties together with Zittel’s thinking on the interplay of art and design and also “Design as Visual Organization,” a chapter I flipped to in Anni Albers’ book “On Weaving,” which I found in the A-Z West weaving library the other day.
Look, part of me is: “Really? The Beatles?” But hear me out.
Was there anyone not smoking in this film/the sixties? I swear if there was a baby in this film, they’d be smoking.